Serbian Rage in Kosovo: Last Gasp or First Breath?

NICHOLAS KULISH

Monday

Feb 25, 2008 at 3:45 AM

The world is waiting to see whether Thursday’s riots were the final spasm of anger in Serbia or the first tremor in a new Balkan earthquake.

BELGRADE, Serbia — Nationalist hooligans may have been behind the burning of the United States Embassy here, but the feelings of anger, sorrow and betrayal over the loss of Kosovo cut across all segments of Serbian society.

The world is waiting to see whether the riots on Thursday were the final spasm of anger in Serbia or the first tremor in a new Balkan earthquake. The deep-seated disappointment of even the most staunchly pro-Western Serbs suggests that there will be no easy reconciliation in the wake of the declaration of independence by Kosovo’s overwhelming ethnic Albanian majority.

Jasmina Petkovic, 31, is the kind of young Serb that European Union leaders are counting on to lead the country back into the Western fold. She favors rapid entry into the European Union for her country and was actively engaged for years in the demonstrations against Slobodan Milosevic, marching in the cold and choking on tear gas to help rid the country of its dictator.

As an organizer of arts events at the Belgrade Cultural Center, Ms. Petkovic works with foreign artists. She has an Italian boyfriend.

“If you were here on Sunday,” Ms. Petkovic told a foreign reporter over the weekend, referring to the day of Kosovo’s independence declaration a week earlier, “I would be spitting on America, cursing Europeans, saying, ‘You are stealing our territory, just because you are bigger and you can do it.’ ” The depth of her sadness and anger surprised even her, she said.

Yet on Thursday night, when she heard the breaking glass and caught the all-too-familiar scent of tear gas in her nearby apartment during the embassy attack, all she felt was disappointment and shame at the violent actions of her countrymen. “You always think this is the worst thing possible and it isn’t true,” she said in excellent English. “It’s always getting worse.”

The meaning of the Kosovo Province to Serbs is neatly encapsulated in phrases like “ancestral heartland” that do little to capture its depth and centrality as a symbol of national pride. The declaration was akin to foreign powers forcing the United States to give up the Alamo, only worse.

But experts here say policy makers in Washington and Brussels may have seriously underestimated the Serbian bond to Kosovo. They say they can only hope its severing will not lead Serbia into a new era of isolation that would be destabilizing for the entire region.

“They were probably hinging too much on these polls that Serbia would wake up the next day and say, ‘Let’s get on with life,’” said Ivan Vejvoda, executive director of the Balkan Trust for Democracy, a nonprofit grant-making organization in Serbia. “I think they underestimated this cultural attachment, that at the moment of loss the emotions run high.”

The independence of Kosovo is by far the hardest blow in the series of secessions from the former Yugoslavia that began in 1991. After years of watching the country being whittled down — in 2006 Montenegro peacefully ended its union with Serbia — there was an expectation among reform -minded Serbs that, having rid themselves of Mr. Milosevic and embraced democracy, their case would be heard differently.

“Now we’ve been doing things the right way, and it’s still not good enough, and Serb national interests are crushed,” said Ljiljana Smajlovic, editor in chief of the prominent Serbian newspaper Politika. Ms. Smajlovic said she expected the nationalists to become more powerful as a result, leading to years of recrimination “deeply harmful for the democratic process.”

Belgrade has been quiet since the attacks on several embassies and the looting of shops. Residents marveled at how quickly things seemed to have gone back to normal.

But for many, anti-American feelings are deeply ingrained. A short walk down Kneza Milosa Street from the United States Embassy, the ruins of the hulking former Yugoslav Defense Ministry — the front sheared off in places, rusted steel trailing from collapsed floors — are a grotesque monument to the NATO bombing campaign in 1999.

The airstrikes were intended to oust Serbian forces that had committed widespread atrocities against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, but that did not diminish the bitterness many Serbians here still feel at being attacked.

Radoslav Zelenovic, 59, is the general director of the Yugoslav Film Archive in Belgrade, which houses 95,000 films, many of them American. Mr. Zelenovic lights up when he describes the white-jacketed orchestra, the airplanes and the actors that were gathered in Belgrade for the 50th anniversary screenings of “Casablanca” in 1992.

But Mr. Zelenovic’s view of America was drastically altered, he said, when the archive was hit during the NATO airstrikes, though the films were rescued. “I cannot change my approach toward American culture or my American friends, but I deeply disrespect the American politics,” he said through a translator.

Mr. Zelenovic, who grew up in Kosovo, likened the loss of the province for Serbia to an amputation without anesthesia. But he deplored the attack on the embassy, saying diplomacy at the United Nations Security Council was “the next step in the fight for Kosovo to come back within the Serbian border.”

The United States failed to gain the necessary support in the Security Council for a resolution in favor of the independence of Kosovo, and the lack of United Nations endorsement is consistently cited by the Serbian government and people on the street as proof that Kosovo’s declaration of independence was illegitimate.

Ms. Petkovic said she could not help noting the response of the United States to the embassy attack. “The first reaction of American authorities was that they will put the protest in the United Nations Security Council,” she said with a wry smile.

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